James Joyce's 'Work in Progress' by Hulle Dirk Van;

Author:Hulle, Dirk Van; [Dirk Van Hulle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317111535
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Gramophone Record

In autumn 1927, the Paris Times (19 November 1927) reported that Joyce had ‘entertained at his home a few of his friends with a reading from his “work in progress”. Those present felt that the new prose style of Mr Joyce gains enormously in wit and comprehensibility by being read aloud by the author’ (UBC 68: 2028). Three years later, this impression led to Anna Livia Plurabelle’s translation into another medium, offering a more literal interpretation of the line ‘I want to hear all about Anna Livia’. In July 1929, Joyce wrote to Sylvia Beach that he had seen C.K. Ogden in London, who wanted ‘to do a disc of my reading last 4 pages of Alp’ (JJSB 164). The record was produced in August 1929 at the Orthological Institute in London. Some of the reports, such as the New York Herald’s ‘In the Latin Quarter’, give a sense of the degree to which – in contrast with the growing number of negative reviews – there was also a community in Paris that idolized Joyce, watched his every move and worshipped each object he touched. The scroll from which Joyce read the text to be recorded (now held at the University at Buffalo) was treated almost as a sacred object with the aura of a religious relic: ‘Only a very few persons have been permitted a glimpse of the specially printed scroll of Mr. Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, done in large clear lettering, from which the author read this latest work while in London, for a phonographic record’. And for those who wondered how the recording session proceeded: ‘The author is stated to have sat back comfortably in an easy chair, reading his own manuscript in scroll form’ (24 September 1929; UBC 36: 36).

Many of the reactions in the press came with a delay of sometimes more than a year. The Daily Express announced on 10 September 1930 that a gramophone record had been made of Joyce’s reading of the last four pages of Anna Livia Plurabelle: ‘an organization called the Orthological Institute in London is supplying it to such of the elect as agree, with Mr. Joyce, that English ought not to be “as she is spoke” but as Mr. Joyce would have her spoke’ (UBC 36: 885). A few critics wrote somewhat slight-ingly of the ‘hitherandthithering’ double 12-inch record, like Wyndham Lewis (‘Mustard and Cress’) in the Sunday Referee of 30 August 1931: ‘One perceives a new form of evening entertainment for the intelligentsia’ (UBC 35: 910). But on the whole, the project seems to have helped many readers and reviewers appreciate Anna Livia Plurabelle. In a review of the Faber and Faber edition, for instance, Geoffrey Grigson noted: ‘Read as Mr. Joyce intends them to be (and Joyce himself has recorded his reading of the last four pages on a double-sided gramophone record) these lines are efficient and beautiful’. This aural quality of the texts contributed to his appreciation: ‘To say […] that the latest product

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.